Stefania #2
"We also have a wing in the main house available to us," he says, reading my expression. "But I thought you might prefer the…privacy." He looks at me for a beat. Then he moves to the kitchen and takes down two glasses and a bottle of vodka from the shelf above the stove.
"Drink?" he asks.
"Please."
He pours. Hands me a glass. Our fingers brush and the contact is brief but specific, and I feel it travel up my arm and settle somewhere between my ribs.
We sit. Him on one end of the couch, me on the other. A careful distance. Enough space to breathe. He leans back and takes a slow drink and doesn't rush to fill the silence.
"I'm not going to pretend this is normal," he says after a while. "Two strangers sitting in a house after a ceremony neither of us planned. That's not normal."
"No, I guess it isn’t, even in our world." Arranged marriages are a thing of the past. Forced marriages died out a long time ago. This sits somewhere in between and neither of us grew up expecting it.
"I'm also not going to pretend I don't want you. You saw that at the reception. You were watching me with the baby and you saw it and I let you because I don't lie to the people in my life."
My breath catches but I cover the sound with a sip of vodka.
"But this doesn't happen tonight unless you want it to." He turns the glass slowly in his hands. "There's no pressure. No expectation. No timeline. When it happens, it happens because you chose it. I need that to be clear."
"And if I never choose it?"
He looks at me. A slow, measuring look that makes my skin warm. "You will."
It's not arrogance. It's certainty. The same certainty he had at the altar when he leaned in to kiss me and said those words instead.
"What you said to me," I start, and then stop because I'm not sure how to ask this without giving myself away. "At the ceremony. When you kissed me. What did you mean?"
He doesn't answer immediately. He takes another drink. Sets the glass on the table beside him. Looks at me with those steady, seeing eyes.
"I meant that I've watched you for three weeks, Stefania. I've seen the way you move, the way you assess a room, the way you hold yourself like someone who's been trained to disappear. That's not something a girl learns at a home gym three days a week."
My pulse spikes. I keep my face still.
"I'm not asking you to explain it," he says. "Not until you're ready, at least. But I want you to know that whatever you think you're hiding, I'm not afraid of it. I married you because of it."
The words are precise. The clean, surgical cut of someone who knows exactly where to slice.
Nobody has ever said that to me. Nobody has ever looked at me and seen past the mask and said I want that one. The real one. The dangerous one.
My hands are shaking. I set my glass down so he won't see.
"I don’t know what you’re talking about." I’m proud that my voice is still steady and my normal tone. Because inside I’m beginning to let panic creep into the edges of my psyche.
"You do. And I’ll be right here when you want to share more about that side of yourself."
The silence stretches between us. I wait for it to feel heavy and threatening.
Instead, something in my chest loosens. The same thing that happened at the altar when he whispered in my ear.
The exhale. The involuntary release of tension I didn't know I was holding until it left and I felt a ton lighter.
He sees me. He actually sees me. And he's still here. Still steady. Still looking at me with those eyes that don't flinch.
I've spent six years being invisible. Hiding the parts of myself that are sharp and dark and dangerous because the world I was born into doesn't have room for women who fight back.
I buried myself under compliance and silence, and I told myself that was enough. That surviving was the same as living.
It's not. I know that now. I've known it for a while.
And this man, this stranger I married four hours ago, is the first person who has ever looked at me and said I don't want the mask. I want what's underneath.
I pick up my glass and take a long, slow drink.
"One question," I say.
"Anything," he replies and it feels like flirtation mixed with a dare. His tone makes my heart stutter.
"When you find out the rest, the parts you don't know yet, what happens then?"
He holds my gaze without blinking.
"Then I’ll claim them. Every part of you. All of it. You don’t ever have to hide from me."
I stand up and walk to his end of the couch. I watch his eyes track me, steady and dark and waiting, and I feel the thing inside me that's been coiled tight for six years start to unfurl.
I stop in front of him. Close enough that my knees almost touch his. Close enough that he has to tilt his head back to look up at me and the shift in angle makes something flicker in his expression. Surprise, maybe. The first genuine surprise I've seen from him all day.
"I don't do anything halfway," I say. "If I give you this, it's because I chose it. Not because you told me to. Not because some contract says I have to. Because I want to. Understand?"
Tension or restraint shift in his jaw. He nods once.